Need Help Assessing My Upgrade Plan

Community Support
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Sorry if I’m posting this in the wrong area. :folded_hands:

I’ve been thinking about upgrading my laptop to one of the newer AMD mainboards and jumping ship from Windows as my daily driver OS in one fell swoop. The only problem is that I’m a :sparkles:“creative”:sparkles: and I’ve never used Linux for creative work before. I know it’s doable but there’s going to be a bit of a learning curve, and I’d like to keep my Windows 10 install intact/archived somehow so I can go back to it and grab stuff from my old set-up as it was, as I need to. The way my music production set-up is, doing any kind of system transfer or upgrade tends to disrupt a bunch of my projects and it’s been a pain for me historically to sort out every time. So I’m envisioning converting my existing Windows 10 install to LTSC (to keep it “good” for the foreseeable future), doing registry edits to convert it to be bootable externally, and then slapping that SSD/install into a USB-C enclosure that I can boot into from the new mainboard when I need to. I know it’s going to be a bit messy after pushing Windows through all those hoops and installing the new hardware drivers and uninstalling the old ones but if my music projects manage to stay intact that’s all I’m concerned about, since I won’t be spending the bulk of my time on Windows going forward anyway. I really just want my projects to stay how they are if they can. Does this sound like a plausible course of action or am I dreaming here?

Path of least resistance would dictate that I simply leave my old SSD in the old mainboard and rig that back up to life to extract what I need when I need it, but I wanted to pass that mainboard along to a friend that needs a newer computer.

I guess worst-case scenario if it can’t be helped would be to do an all-internal dual-boot on the new SSD and just deal with the pain of rejigging/cleaning up all my music projects as I go back to them. I do really like the idea of being able to physically unhitch myself from the “training wheels” of having Windows to fall back on though.

Let me know your thoughts, hopefully I don’t sound too insane.

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Booting from an external USB is very hit and miss, there are several topics about having issues with that in the forum. I would recommend putting Windows on another internal SSD, just in case you need it.

For music production, the easiest distro to start with is Ubuntu Studio: https://ubuntustudio.org/

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Great that you are considering upgrading the board in your Framework Laptop. Since you want to rip off the band-aid with Windows and hop over to Linux, maybe consider going to something like Ubuntu and running the Windows image in a virtual machine (VM) under Linux. The newer board will be substantially faster if upgrading from an 11th Gen board and should still be at least as powerful as the old machine with the overhead from running it in a VM.

Dual boot does work fairly well with the single SSDin the Framework. Install Windows first of course and then install Linux. If going to the trouble of buying a new board, buying a bigger SSD would also be worth doing from the standpoint that if everything really went south, and a project had to be ressurected the old SSD has a virgin last state of Windows before the change.

This will give extra room for to OS’ and room for more projects in the future. Later on getting an external SSD case, the previous SSD can be a handy and quick source of external backups for peace of mine, especially when travelling (can never have enough of original works/memories backed up)